


In the Court of the Tattered King

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Vampyr (Video Game)
Genre: Dubiously Consensual Blood Drinking, Dubiously consensual rough sex, Horror, It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, M/M, Not so much ‘fuck or die’ as ‘fuck and die’, Post-Canon, Unusually high death rate in peaceful English village caused by eldritch monstrosity, Vampires - character is turned against their will, Vampires - character is turned to save their life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-11-01 23:49:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20550008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: The last time Jonathan Reid fought with Geoffrey McCullum he spared his life and left him human. Perhaps that wasn’t the way things were meant to go.





	In the Court of the Tattered King

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).

> The title was inspired by The King in Yellow, by Robert W Chambers, which I, uh, really need to get around to reading one of these days.

They’re here.

Beyond the circle of standing stones, through the driving rain plastering his hair to his skull, Jonathan can see a shadow pressed close to the trunk of a winter-bare birch tree, a tangle of hair peeping out. And there’s more of them, creeping closer, slipping from tree to tree. He hears a hiss and something whips by the outside of the circle, as fast as an Ekon, although no self-respecting Ekon would allow themselves to reek the way this thing reeks, of damp earth and rot. It’s not a Skal either, but something much worse.

Jonathan glimpses a pallid bloated face, maggot-white and mottled, like a corpse pulled from the water. Through the ragged filthy hair its eyes seem too large, like the eye sockets in a skull, and then it’s gone, vanishing into the trees. They’re getting bolder, drawing closer to the circle of stones. The scent of blood has drawn them, exciting them the same way it’s exciting him. His teeth ache with the need to feed, to feast, and that ache is getting harder to resist, especially with the fingers clawing through his head, the voice that whispers without words, with only a series of impressions and images, that they’re not so very different after all. It’s testing him, testing the limits of the power it could wield over him if it chose, all the things it could get him to do with just the slightest little push.

“It’s not enough blood,” McCullum says, and for once in all the time they’ve known each other, Jonathan whole-heartedly agrees with him. When Jonathan turns towards him, squinting because of the rain, McCullum’s holding the knife out, and Jonathan, dizzied and disoriented as he is, can’t tell if it’s meant as a threat or an offering.

Droplets of McCullum’s blood burst on the ground like over-ripe buries and sink into the slick trampled grass and mud. Wasted. A rush of involuntary rage takes Jonathan by surprise, and he peels his lips back from his teeth in a snarl.

McCullum sees it, gives him a hard bitter smile. “You can’t fight your nature, leech. This is what you are.”

Jonathan shakes his head. “No,” he says, but even as he speaks, his heart sings out _ yes_. McCullum has plenty of blood to spare, so would it really be so terrible? Just a couple of drops, or perhaps a mouthful, even a pint or two, but certainly no more than could be spared, and as for that rip in McCullum’s skin, well, it couldn’t possibly hurt for Jonathan to worry it a bit to get the blood flowing again, because McCullum is right, damn him, the stones demand a much higher price than the one they’ve paid already.

What little blood has been shed here wouldn’t be enough for an Ekon, so how could it possibly be enough for whatever monstrous intelligence is at the heart of all of this. By the expression on McCullum’s face, he knows it too.

Jonathan shakes his head to clear his skull, and as he does so the indistinct figures come slipping closer. They circle around the stones, eyes shining wetly black and teeth glittering. The rain streams down over mud-soaked hair, over elongated bodies that ought to be frail but aren’t, and there’s more of them closing in.

And while Jonathan’s distracted, McCullum takes the opportunity to attack. He kicks hard at the side of Jonathan’s knee, and is on him when his leg crumples, stabbing the knife into Jonathan’s side. As strikes go, it’s unworthy of McCullum, and in fury, Jonathan throws him off, flinging him across the circle, where his back slams against a standing stone. McCullum gives a shaky laugh, devoid of humour, and bares his teeth, his eyes bright with pain, wild and mocking. There’s no vial of precious King Arthur’s blood to lend him courage and strength now; he’s just a man, a little stronger than most, a little braver, but injured and watching his death approach. Watching Jonathan as he stalks forward, what’s left of his humanity shrinking to a pin prick, reduced to a guttering candle suspended in an ocean of darkness.

When he reaches McCullum’s feet, he drops into a crouch, lips wrinkled back from teeth fully extended, the coppery taste of blood already in his mouth. He’s half blinded from the rain and McCullum’s face is a smear as Jonathan crawls up over his body. The ground beneath him trembles, the stones closing in as if they are alive and this is something they wish to witness more closely.

McCullum grins at him. “Destiny, Reid,” he says, and grips Jonathan’s shirt front. Jonathan curls his fingers around his wrist in turn, but McCullum doesn’t fight him, just hauls him closer, so close Jonathan can smell his breath, ale and cigarettes and the last precious moments of a man’s life before it slips away. “We always knew it was going to end like this.”

~o~0~o~

**Beginnings**

It felt like dying again. 

Jonathan clawed his way up out of the grip of unconsciousness, gasped as his eyes snapped open and he felt wetness on his face. He seemed to be staring up at a jagged hole in the universe, a gash in reality that opened onto darkness, and which resolved, gradually, into the window of the train, bafflingly above him until he realised why: the first class compartment had been turned on its side, and he was sprawled half across the seat, half across the other window, lying in puddling rainwater. It crept down beneath the collar of his shirt and along his spine, chilling his cool skin still further. It would have made him shiver had his body retained the physiological functions of a living man.

Gingerly, he sat up and checked his watch, but the glass had shattered and the mechanism stopped. At least it was still dark. He had that to be thankful for. He retrieved his hat and his case, and pushed them out through the window, before hauling himself after them.

On top of the carriage, he donned his hat and squinted through the rain at the wreckage of the train, strewn across the countryside like a cast-off toy. There were no lights, no sign of life, and no one responded when he cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed that he was a doctor and was anybody hurt. Nor could he smell any blood on the air, which ought to have come as something of a relief, since it suggested no injuries had been sustained, but it seemed to him that in a crash this bad a lack of blood made little sense. Had _he_ been human, he would certainly have sustained severe injuries, and might even have been killed; it made no sense that everyone other than him would have been lucky enough to escape injury.

But even with the senses of an Ekon finely attuned to the scent of blood, he could find nothing amiss, no hearts beating, no cooling bodies, no blood left behind. But then, in that case, where on earth had everyone vanished to? Had they given up on the possibility of help coming? And why had they left him alone? Had they found his unconscious body and in the absence of a pulse made the decision to abandon him and seek shelter from the gathering storm? Perhaps, but even if they had, he would have expected a conductor or the driver to stay with the wreckage to wait for help to arrive.

The whole situation was baffling.

He cast his gaze around. On either side of the train track, bleak hills rose up, fields demarcated by the dark silhouettes of ancient hedgerows. Past the hills, he saw a glimmer of light in the distance. So perhaps they had been tempted by the promise of warmth and shelter and left the train in search of aid.

Giving up on the mystery, he took up his case and jumped down from the side of the carriage, landing in a patch of mud that splattering his trouser legs with filth. He growled under his breath, stuck his case under his arm, and, cursing British weather and British Rail both, struck out through the rain in search of civilisation.

His journey was neither a pleasant nor an easy one. The wind whipped up, slapping the pounding rain into his face as he clambered over stiles, and trod carefully over ground that was more marshland than field, hoping that what pathways he’d managed to find were public footpaths and that he wasn’t inadvertently trespassing. Still, it seemed unlikely that he’d stumble on any irate farmers on a night as miserable as this one. And if he did… well, frankly, tough. At this point, he was past caring.

The rain threw off his senses. Some of the fields he tried to cross were half-flooded, deep lagoons of murky water that looked deep enough to drown cows in, and it was a struggle to find a solid path at all, let alone one that led in the right direction. At one point he’d resigned himself gloomily to losing his boot, since even the strength of a vampire seemed no match for determined English mud but he won out in the end. 

Then in another sodden field, lightning flashed, and for an instant he’d thought it a shell – German or English, it didn’t much matter which; both were quite capable of ripping apart the flesh of Englishmen – and he thought he saw bodies in the mud around him, half-submerged and clawing at each other, searching for purchase.

Then the light died, plunging him back into a darkness he was almost grateful for. Nothing there. His Ekon senses told him that, and he had no reason to distrust them, especially when it felt far safer to tell himself he was being a fool and continue, making his way to another stile, ignoring the faint sound of splashing behind him. Like Orpheus in the Underworld he refused to look back, throwing his case over and himself after it. In his haste he slipped, landing on hands and knees in the mud, and as he scrambled to his feet, he heard the sudden crack of a branch, as loud as a gunshot. His gaze snapped up, towards a copse of trees at the crest of the hill.

_ There’s someone there. _

He could see it watching him, an impossible thing since his senses told him there was nothing there, living or undead, but he could still see it anyway. It had the feeling of a waking dream, a trick of light and shadow, and it was just his imagination that he could see the gleam of eyes and of sharp teeth. He blinked and it was gone, resolving into a shadow again. A trick of the light after all.

But he’d lost his way completely now. The labyrinth of mud and fields and hedgerows had thrown him off. There was no sign of the lights he had seen earlier, and nor was there any hint of which way to go, and he had no way of knowing that other than gaining high ground. He glanced uneasily at the copse of trees, but there was nothing there now and there never had been.

Besides, so what if there was? Good lord, he was a monster himself, a creature of teeth and shadow. He had nothing to fear from other monsters. So he climbed the slope, clambering up over the slippery grass, fighting his unease at coming so close to those naked leafless trees, to the place where he saw the shadow lurking.

By the time he reached it, he was wet through, cold and uncomfortable enough that he’d all but forgotten his unease. Any monster that tried to attack him, in the mood he was in, would very soon find itself regretting that decision. The thought amused him, but as he drew closer to the trees, his amusement faded.

His hunger was growing. It was always present, that hunger, and had been since he was turned. It was something that could only ever be ignored and never truly sated, and now it rose up inside him, growing from a gnawing at his ribs to something that clawed at him until he could think of nothing except blood. He swallowed and cast his senses around in search of prey: a rat, a rabbit, _ anything _ , so long as it wasn’t human and it bled – and a quiet insistent little voice that he could never quite stifle whispered that only one of those requirements was _ truly _ non-negotiable – but there was nothing, especially here. No life at all. He’d never known anywhere to be so dead and devoid of life. It was unnerving and it made him long for London.

He wanted to look away, to turn his back on this dead copse of trees and never look back, but he was a sensible man, a rational man, and so he did the least rational thing – given how his rational beliefs had already been tested many times over – and stared between the trees, searching for… well, in truth he wasn’t certain what he was searching for or what he was likely to find. Certainly not what he did find, and which finally led him to step hesitantly between the line of trees and into the copse.

Hidden within the trees stood a circle of standing stones, each roughly hewn and about the height of a man. They looked old. So old the trees must have grown up around them, but there were no trees growing in the centre of the circle. 

There was an electric prickle in the air. It felt as if he were being held suspended on the cusp of something about to happen, and then, without warning, he fell.

It felt like the sun streaming through the clouds. It burned. He tasted blood, fresh from the source, flooding his mouth, so much blood it spilled over his lips and down his chin, so much blood that he was drowning in it, and then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.

He dropped to his knees, gasping, jaw working with the need to bite. On his knees he felt a presence hidden beneath him, something old and vast and malevolent which writhed beneath the surface of everything, and just as he sensed it, it sensed him in turn, and as powerful as he was, an Ekon from a strong bloodline, in comparison to this thing he was as vulnerable as a mouse frozen before a viper.

Something squirmed inside his head, a sensation like a third eye flaring open in the middle of his skull, and it raked through his thoughts and memories at will before releasing him, abruptly and without warning. It left him gasping for air that he emphatically should not have needed and fighting the urge to bring up what little blood he last ate, the latest in a long line of insufficient meals.

He hadn’t felt this disoriented in a long time. It was almost like being a newborn again, but at least the thing he’d sensed briefly had gone. Now there was just the rain, and the trees and the gathering storm. Another flash of lightning illuminated the nearest stone and the peal of thunder that followed sounded much closer and louder than before.

He turned his back on the circle and on the trees, ignoring the instinctive itch of warning, his hunter’s senses ringing out as he climbed up the slope to the crest of the ridge, and saw, with an all-encompassing flood of relief, the lights of civilisation glimmering in the valley below.

Shelter at last.

* * *

There was, thank God, an inn, its windows shuttered against the storm. It was an old building, all Tudor beams and plaster and crumbling, ivy-clad brickwork, with a sign proclaiming the name of the inn as The Sixth Bell. Oddly, the low squat place of worship in the painted sign bore no resemblance to the humble Anglican church Jonathan had passed on his way through the village’s rain-swept streets, although that church must have been a couple of hundred years old at least. Then again, it wasn’t as if he’d looked too closely. Perhaps it was tradition, the sign harking back to an older time, an older church.

Then he had to duck his head to avoid cracking his skull open on the lintel and he forgot all about the sign, which, in retrospect, might have been a mistake. The landlady seemed a friendly sort, who ushered him inside with motherly concern at the state of his clothes, and how he was soaked to the skin and covered in mud. When she assured him there was a room he might have kissed her. She reacted in horror at his tale of the crash, although she wasn’t surprised; the news had already reached her, so it seemed some of his fellow passengers had reached safety after all, but the telephone lines were down, so there was no way of alerting the authorities. The storm was going to be a bad one. Best to stay in the safe and warm and wait for the storm to pass. Things, she assured him, would look very different in the morning.

And there was a roaring fire to chase away the chill of the rain once he’d changed into a dry set of clothes and towelled off his hair in a cramped room with about as much personality and comfort as a monk’s cell.

If the landlady was friendly, the rest of the inn’s patrons were less so, a scant handful of hard-eyed men in grimy tweed clustered around a table who eyed him darkly when they thought he wasn’t looking.

He ordered a half-pint of bitter and took a seat in a nook by the fireplace. He couldn’t drink it, but the seat was so comfortable that he couldn’t bear to leave it for the bleak emptiness of his room, and he could hardly sit there without a drink to hand, so instead he sat with his eyes half-closed and waited until the murmuring returned, punctuated by occasional bursts of muffled laughter. The hostility never quite faded though, and from time to time he sensed curious glances cast his way, but he was too exhausted to care, so tired he felt like he could have slept for a fortnight.

He sank into the threadbare seat, the crackle of the fire raising old memories, ugly memories, and to avoid them he searched his mind for his memory of the crash. He found nothing of the crash itself, and little of the journey, except for one of his fellow passengers, a shabbily genteel young woman in a green dress who’d attempted, with the clumsiness born of being out of practice, to flirt with him until she’d run up against the ground of his apologetic lack of interest.

He’d also taken the time to glance over the letter from Usher Talltree of the Brotherhood, sent care of Edgar who’d handed it over, saying, “It seems you’ve been summoned, dear boy.” His eyes had been bright and cheerful, almost excited, as if this were to be a thrilling adventure. But then everything was a thrilling adventure to Edgar these days, even death.

Thinking of the letter reminded him that the Brotherhood would be expecting him, and he really ought to call ahead and let them know he’d been waylaid, but then he remembered the storm and the telephone lines and subsided back into his seat, frowning. He still wasn’t quite himself. Perhaps the result of a blow to the head, if creatures such as he could suffer from concussion. Besides, most likely they’d know about the storm already.

The floorboards creaked with a heavy deliberate tread, interrupting his thoughts, and someone spoke.

“_ Jonathan Reid. _”

It was, he realised with dawning dread, a voice he knew, Irish with a dark barely suppressed undercurrent of anger. He lifted his head, his dulled senses prickling back to life, and stared bleakly at Geoffrey McCullum, standing with pint in hand, silhouetted against the fire.

“I should have known you’d be mixed up in this somewhere,” McCullum said.

His expression was strange. It was dark with irritation, of course, his brows knitted in a scowl, but it seemed to Jonathan that there was something else beneath, the faintest trace of weary amusement, as if Jonathan’s presence here was a strange twist of fate that McCullum appreciated despite his own misgivings.

“Why, McCullum,” Jonathan said with heavy irony. “This_ is _ a pleasant surprise.”

“Spare me, Reid.” McCullum slid into the seat opposite, and slammed down his pint of ale hard enough to draw the attention of the inn’s other patrons. Sharp glances, and they looked away quickly. Only the landlady’s gaze lingered; she was slow to look their way and slow to look away, too, smiling, but her mouth was tight. “I don’t have time for your games. I want to know how exactly you’re involved in this bloody mess.”

“I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Jonathan paused at McCullum’s snort, then continued. “It’s the truth, McCullum. The train I was on was involved in an accident–”

“What sort of accident?”

“I have no idea. I was asleep when it happened.”

“Asleep?” McCullum frowned and took a swallow of his ale, head tilted to one side, his gaze speculative. “Since when do leeches risk sleeping outside of their filthy nests?”

Jonathan’s jaw tightened. “I don’t have a _ nest _ at all, let alone a filthy one. Still... You make an excellent point. None of this makes any sense.” He glanced up, casting his gaze around the bar. No one else present, other than the table of farmers and the landlady. And aside from the locals he'd seen no one other than McCullum since he’d arrived. There’d been no sounds from above, no footsteps, no creaking floorboards, and it wasn’t as if the hour was that late. “Have you seen any other strangers arrive tonight?”

“You're serious about that train crash.” McCullum scratched his stubbled jaw and ran his gaze over Jonathan’s shirt, rumpled from the case. “I suppose it’d explain your appearance.” Jonathan stiffened in his seat, adjusting his collar, and McCullum flashed him a hard grin. “No need to groom yourself on my account, Reid. I don’t give a damn what you look like.” His eyes glinted as he settled back in the chair, bringing his glass to his lips, perhaps to hide his smile as he studied Jonathan.

And since he was being examined, Jonathan took the opportunity to study McCullum in turn. Unlike Jonathan, the hunter had aged in the intervening years. He was looking older, with threads of silver at his temples and some extra lines etched around his eyes, but paradoxically he seemed younger, as if the trying times of the war, the epidemic, and the Guard of Priwen’s preparations for the Great Hunt had hardened him before his time. His face was softer now and rather unnervingly he looked like a man who might actually crack a genuine smile once in a while. Jonathan felt a momentary stab of disappointment that they’d never had the chance to know each other before any of this, before the war and the epidemic, before Jonathan’s death and subsequent resurrection. The chance to know each other when they’d just been men, instead of… instead of whatever the hell they were.

“I haven’t seen anyone,” McCullum said finally. “But I’ve been keeping to my room so I might’ve missed them.”

Jonathan grunted, dropping his gaze to the surface of his bitter. “Does that seem likely to you?”

“Not really.” McCullum leaned forwards, lowering his voice. “You know that feeling, Reid? Like you’re being hunted? Well, I’m feeling it right now.”

Jonathan risked a glance around the bar. No one was looking their way now. The farmers were murmuring between themselves, but he suspected their attention was still fixed on this table. “So am I.”

“And for once it’s not me doing the hunting,” McCullum murmured. “Not _ yet _ anyway, but who knows, doctor. The night’s still young.”

“You are hunting something, though,” Jonathan said, ignoring this. “The rest of the Guard...?”

McCullum gave a shake of his head. “It’s just me. But you’re right. I am on a trail.”

“Do you believe in coincidences, McCullum?”

“Not as a rule, no. And almost never when they involve mysterious train crashes.”

“Nor do I.”

McCullum was silent for a moment, then swallowed down the last dregs of his ale. He stood up, nodding to Jonathan’s half-pint. “You going to drink that?”

“You know I can’t.”

McCullum took it and drained it in three long gulps. Startled, Jonathan watched, drawn to the movements of McCullum’s throat as he swallowed, then he set the glass down and jerked his head. “You coming or not?”

“Where to?”

“We’ve got a lot to talk about, Reid, and I’m damned if I’m going to do it here.”

* * *

If anything, McCullum’s room was even smaller and bleaker than Jonathan’s, but it felt more comfortable in some indefinable way. Perhaps it had something to do with this room feeling more lived in. McCullum had clearly been staying here a while, and the faint smell of damp in the air was not quite enough to cover up the way the room seemed to smell of McCullum himself, as though his presence had sunk into the walls like cigarette smoke. A marked-up map of the local area was spread on a rickety table, and the bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled in a way that made Jonathan wonder exactly when McCullum had woken up, and whether the bedding was still warm. It wasn’t just vampires that led a nocturnal life.

Then McCullum was drawing his attention to the map and Jonathan looked away from the bed with some relief.

People died here, McCullum told him. More than could be expected given how peaceful and rural it was. More than the roughest areas in London. Sometimes the deaths seemed to be accidents, or suicides, or murders. Sometimes people simply went missing, vanishing into the hills without a trace. And there were countless cautionary tales about the area, including one account in an Anglo-Saxon chronicle that mentioned everyone in the village vanishing overnight without a trace. There had been a village here for a very long time, it seemed.

“The work of vampires, perhaps,” Jonathan suggested cautiously, not much liking to draw attention to the depredations of his race. McCullum shook his head, his eyes intent.

“There _ are _ no vampires here, Reid. Except for you. They’re terrified of the place, Skals and Ekons both, and that got me wondering, what sort of creature could be powerful enough to have centuries-old leeches cowering in terror?”

It didn’t seem to be the sort of question that required an answer. Jonathan stayed silent, thinking of the stone circle, of the feeling he’d had that there was something vast lurking beneath the world like a leviathan beneath the surface of the ocean.

McCullum eyed him. “You really didn’t know about any of this, did you?”

“Nothing at all,” Jonathan said grimly. “I am, however, starting to think my being here is no coincidence.”

McCullum opened his mouth to reply, but before he could speak, the single peal of a bell rang out, dull and sonorous and mournful. They turned to the window.

“I passed the church earlier,” Jonathan said, frowning. “It was closed up tight. I would have sworn the building was empty.”

“It’s worse than that, Reid,” McCullum said, his voice low. “There _ are _ no bells in that church. They were all melted down for scrap metal in the war.”

As they exchanged a look, the lights went out, plunging them into darkness.

Jonathan started to his feet, but a wave of dizziness crashed over him, and his legs crumpled. It was back, his hunger, and it was no longer simply the urgent need to feed of a newborn, or even of a half-starved Ekon, but the yearning to feast, to gorge, to rip and tear and feel flesh part beneath his teeth and claws. It was a need born from the sheer bloody joy in the slaughter, and it came not from himself, but from something malevolent and cruel and entirely alien, a separate entity which seemed to have taken up residence in his skull, and had chosen this moment to make itself known. Perhaps it was the bell that had woken it from its slumber. Perhaps it had been lying dormant there since he’d stumbled across the stone circle, and he shuddered at the thought, feeling the pressure of it against the backs of his eyes, its stench, a reek of damp earth and mildew and rotting leaves filling his throat.

Desperate to rid himself of it, he would have clawed it out through his eyes if that was what it took, and he was reaching up to do exactly that when something gripped his wrists. He snarled, then, at the sound of McCullum’s voice, his eyes snapped open. He saw the stake, readied, and went still. McCullum’s expression was not anger, exactly, but of determination, softened with the slightest suggestion of regret. Jonathan caught at his wrist, shook his head when McCullum raised the stake. “No! No, I’m… I’m all right.”

“What the hell was that?”

He shook his head again, to clear it this time, and felt a sensation like water trapped in his ears. Whatever was going on here, he thought, it was bad. Worse than anything he’d ever faced before. The world spun, off-kilter. What the hell had the Brotherhood got him caught up in this time, and had Edgar known? He tried to sit up, dragged himself back to rest his back against the bed, putting a little distance between himself and McCullum, between himself and the _ stake _.

“I believe,” he said, noting the slur in his voice, “I may have just got a glimpse of what’s going on here.”

Something tightened in McCullum’s expression, a flash of caution. “And?”

“And I hope I never have to experience it again. Whatever it is, this thing you’re hunting, it’s strong. Do you know how to kill it? Are you even certain it can be killed?”

A flash of a smile, rare and unguarded, crossed McCullum’s face. It was every bit as disconcerting as Jonathan had imagined it would be. “Everything can be killed, Reid. Even you. Even me, for that matter.” And then the smile was gone and his expression had tightened once more. “Either way, we’ll soon find out.”

“What do you mean?”

McCullum nodded towards the door. Jonathan glanced towards it, and saw with a shiver of unease, that the door, the door which he was almost certain McCullum had locked, was now standing open. Beyond he could see the darkened landing, where anything might be hiding in the shadows. “Did you open it?”

“Why the fuck would I do that? And no, Reid, I didn’t see it happen. I was too busy trying to stop you from gouging your eyes out. And you know what? I have a feeling like whoever opened that door has just set us on a platter and rang the dinner bell.”

Jonathan nodded grimly and pushed himself to his feet. “Well, I don’t know about you, McCullum, but I have no intention of being anybody’s appetiser. Not _ again _.”

McCullum snorted. “You know where it is, don’t you?”

“I can’t be certain,” Jonathan said. “But I think I know where we can start looking.”

* * *

The inn was quiet, the bar silent and still. Half-finished pints sat dead on the table where the farmers had been drinking. The fire had been extinguished, residual warmth from the last glowing embers still lingering. The door to the outside had been propped open, letting in the rain and whatever else might have wandered along, and it wasn’t just the inn that was deserted. The village was cold and dark, as well, the cottages tightly shuttered with no fires or lights burning. It was, Jonathan thought, a ghost town. There were still people there though. He could sense them, huddled in their houses, sheltering behind solid doors, waiting for the night to pass them by.

And they were being followed. His suspicions were proved for certain when he glanced around and spotted a shadow flitting between two cottages, trailing in their wake. “McCullum.”

“I see it, Reid.” From the tone of McCullum’s voice, he’d already known it was there. “We can’t fight them. Not here and not like this. They can’t be defeated with guns or fire or teeth.”

The worst of it was, he couldn’t sense them. They lacked even the muted lifeforce of the Skals. As far as he could tell, they weren’t flesh and blood, but hollow things, cold as the wet earth. Neither alive, nor undead, but they were quick, and they were easily able to keep pace as Jonathan and McCullum left the dark, sleeping village behind them, following the lane that led to a stile over a hedgerow.

McCullum went first, boosting himself upwards and out of sight. Jonathan followed, but stopped halfway, distracted by a rustling at the base of the hedge. Deep beneath the entwined branches, the ground moved as if it had been disturbed.

It bulged, and something burst through, fingers tipped with curved yellowing claws, limned by the dirt trapped beneath them.

It came up, the first of them, the first he’d seen up close, clawing its way up through the ground, its hair a tangle of roots and mud-matted locks, its waxy skin streaked with dirt. Damp earth clogged the hollow pits of its eyes, and a long bony arm coiled around the base of the stile. It grinned up at him, its mouth a gaping oval fringed with needle-sharp teeth. 

More of them were springing up, bursting from the ground all along the hedgerow, sprouting up like the first growth of spring.

Jonathan jumped, and with his Ekon strength he should have cleared it with ease, but the creature lunged upwards and grabbed his ankle, matching his speed and strength. It yanked him out of the air. 

He hit the ground, his knee slapping into the mud, and the creature grasped at him, dragging him deeper into the mud. To his horror, he could sense its glee at how strong he was, how fast, how _ worthy _, and the buzzing of its joy filled his skull like a swarm of wasps.

A shot rang out, and the creature reeled back, a hole in its skull. Inside he saw more shining wetness, more fucking mud. And still it crouched and bared its teeth at him, singing _ worthyworthyworthy _ until he scrabbled to his feet, reaching out to grasp McCullum’s outstretched arm, the one not holding the gun, and together they turned and scrambled up the slope.

Flashes of lightning lit up the hillside, the slope swarming with pallid-skinned shapes, white as maggots, and their voices sang in his head as he fought what was first a fear and was now a certainty: that they were being herded. That this was where they had been meant to go all along, to the stone circle hidden amongst the trees.

* * *

There was a moment of doubt before he crossed between the stones, but only a moment and then they were in the circle and there was no turning back. It felt like a door slamming shut, but they hadn’t been followed into the trees. Not yet. He stared back the way they’d come for a moment, then turned on McCullum. “What the hell are they?”

“Leeches, Reid. Just like you.”

“Those monstrosities are nothing like me,” he snapped, then at a rustling in the trees he swung around. They were out there. He could hear them: he just couldn’t sense them, any more than he could sense the branches of the trees or the ground beneath his feet. Perhaps there was no reason why he should be able to sense them: he had a feeling that if he cut one of those things, it wouldn’t bleed. Not blood, anyway.

McCullum was watching him, and there was something about the set of his shoulders, the look of his face. He looked tired, almost defeated, and Jonathan felt a cold certainty begin to take root. He glanced over his shoulder. “Why are you here, McCullum? Why is it just you? Where’s the rest of the Guard of Priwen?”

“I already told you...”

“_ Don’t lie to me _.” The compulsion entered his voice, but he could already hear how shaky he sounded. His heart wasn’t in it.

“You’re weak, Reid. Your mind games won’t work on me.”

The creatures were coming. At the edge of the tree line, he saw movement, and in amongst them, an unexpected flash of green, a shade he’d seen before. He thought of the people from the train, his fellow survivors, the woman who’d smiled at him so sweetly. Had she lost her sweetheart in the war, he wondered. Very likely; a great many women had.

It struck him then, a sudden horrible image of the other passengers from the train – all of them – being dragged from the wreckage and into the mud, the dirt filling their mouths, silencing their screams. If they were lucky, they might have drowned.

No wonder he hadn’t sensed them; their bodies must have cooled rapidly to the temperature of the earth.

“Dear God,” he said, shuddering.

One of them was creeping forward, winding its way through the trees, slowly spiralling towards the stone circle. It was the same one that McCullum had shot, mud dribbling from the wound in its forehead and running in rivulets down its face, over its bony chest. Its expression – and Jonathan was painfully aware how ludicrous it was that such a creature should _ have _ an expression – was one of sullenly mute resentment. It seeped mud at him in a way that suggested it longed to rip out his heart and devour it, but it didn’t step beyond the boundary of the circle.

“They can’t get inside,” he guessed and saw McCullum’s curt nod in the corner of his eye. “Very well. How do we stop them?”

In reply, McCullum stripped off his coat and threw it on the ground. He drew his knife and rolled up his shirt sleeve to reveal his forearm, the veins and tendons standing out as he clenched his fist. He gave Jonathan a look that was too weary to be contemptuous. “You disappoint me, Reid,” he said, opening his fist, splaying out his fingers. “How do you _ think _ we stop them?”

And suddenly it all made sense. McCullum’s weariness, his subdued anger and attitude of acceptance, the absence of the Guard of Priwen, even the way he’d seemed so much softer in the inn. It wasn’t defeat that Jonathan had glimpsed a moment ago, but resignation.

“That’s why you’re here alone,” he said. “You’re sacrificing yourself.”

“Now you’re catching on,” McCullum flashed him a tight bitter smile. And he brought the knife up.

Jonathan started towards him, but McCullum moved too quickly, whipping up a rosary he must have had hidden in his sleeve. He dangled it from his outstretched hand, and the light it cast burned more fiercely than sunlight; it scorched hotter than flames. It seared the will straight out of him, and he saw for an instant in that blazing light the terrible face of an unforgiving god and his knees weakened with the uncontrollable urge to prostrate himself and beg for mercy. It left him weak and stumbling, and before he could recover his wits, McCullum slashed the knife across his palm and slapped his hand against the nearest stone.

And after that all Jonathan knew was hunger.

~o~0~o~

**The Court of the King**

They’re here.

They’re circling closer, so close now Jonathan could reach out and touch them if he wanted to, if he wasn’t too busy trying to stop himself from ripping McCullum’s throat out.

It’s not that he hasn’t felt this urge before, but it’s never been so strong, so painful, as though not to indulge would be like shooting himself in the heart all over again. His hunger feels like a river in full flood, the waters threatening to snatch him off his feet, and McCullum’s pain is so palpable it seems to be shimmering off him in waves. It’s so rich Jonathan can taste it. More than that, he can feel it.

There’s something about the air here, the space within the circle, which has bound them together, a thread that runs, not just between them, but between the creatures that watch them and the thing between their feet. He feels it stirring in its restless slumber, its dreams disturbed. It’s a vast and terrible thing, worse than any Ekon, worse even than the old gods he’s already faced down and survived. Through the hunger-bright mist that fogs his mind with the urge to _ riptearbitefeed _ , he knows only one thing: that if this creature rises and he has to face it, he will not survive. No one could. _ Nothing _ could. He doubts even Myrddin Wyllt could stand against it and live.

It whispers to him without words, a scratching in his skull. It’s an alien sensation, as though a barbed serpent is writhing inside his skull, tightening in coils around his brain and squeezing. Repellent. Agonising. There are no words to the thought it plants like a seed in his mind, no suggestion that it has any understanding of the concept of language. The thought consists of a series of flickering ideas that shape into the whole: _ Now you see. _

It’s the first time it’s spoken directly to him. It makes him want to throw up and makes him even hungrier at the same time. He can feel it shaping him, trying to reform his mind into something more to its taste, but carelessly, like it doesn’t really care what happens to him or what damage it causes him in its experimentations. If he breaks, it will toss him away like a rag doll, another failed experiment.

“We always knew it was going to end like this,” McCullum says, and Jonathan comes to, returns to his own body a little, realises that he’s crouched over McCullum’s body, their faces so close they could have kissed.

Slowly McCullum brings his hand up to touch Jonathan’s cheek with a palm sticky with blood. Jonathan turns his head slowly, letting the hand slip-slide over his cheek until the palm rests against his mouth. It feels like a kiss. His lips are clenched tight, but he can taste the blood anyway. The scent is insistent, twining its way up his nose, worming between his lips, and he’s shaking, losing control.

McCullum buries his fingers in Jonathan’s hair, pulling on it until it hurts, and whispers, telling Jonathan in a low insistent growl that they both know what he is: that he’s a leech, a murderer, a monster who can’t fight his nature, and _ bitemeyoufuckingleech _, and then his lips are open, and dear god it’s in his mouth, the blood, and it’s the sweetest he’s ever tasted. He remembers that blood, the way its scent had lingered in the air after their fight, the way he could smell it on his skin afterwards as he thought of the way he left McCullum, bleeding and broken, but alive.

His tongue darts out to flicker against the skin of McCullum’s palm, and it’s not just the blood Jonathan tastes, but his sweat too, salt-briny and sweet, and he groans, a guttural growl deep in his throat, his eyes half-lidded as he licks with urgency at the cut, at the blood, following it along McCullum’s fingers, running his tongue down between the knuckles, chasing every drop–

_ No. _

He wrenches away, squeezes his eyes shut. “No. I won’t do it.” He opens his eyes and meets McCullum’s gaze, sees only despair there.

McCullum hefts the knife. “I don’t want to die like this, Reid. I’m meant to die in battle. So fight me, you bastard. You fucking leech. _ Fight me _.” And he slaps at Jonathan with his bloodied hand, streaking his cheek with blood, spitting at him to fight. He catches McCullum’s wrist, meaning only to restrain him, but the sensation of him struggling, with the taste of his blood still on Jonathan’s lips, is too much to bear, and what’s left of his control is pinched out like a candle.

Jonathan rears back and bites.

McCullum cries out, a sharp sound of pain that changes rapidly in tone, as Jonathan presses him back against the stone, until McCullum reaches up and weakly grips his hair. “Wait,” he manages. “_Wait _.”

Jonathan doesn’t stop. He can’t. He wasn’t prepared for the pure dizzying rush of it, for the hard ache of pleasure at his groin, or how pleasurable it is to drink while in full control – almost – of his senses. To take what he wants, and finally bring an end to his hunger. He wonders, dazed, why he’s denied himself this for so long? There’s a reason, he’s sure there must be a reason, but for the life of him he can’t remember why.

“Reid.” McCullum’s voice breaks through the fog of pleasure and bloodlust. Jonathan is in the mood to be indulgent. Why not? Like a cat allowing a mouse a moment of respite, he breaks away, lips parted, breathing it in, the pulse of blood welling up against his lips. He plays his tongue against the skin, feels a tug on his hair. McCullum’s grey eyes shine with pain and desire and the promise of death. His mouth moves, but the words seem to come from very far away. “We have to stop it.”

At first Jonathan doesn’t understand. His gaze flits up, then he recoils. One of the creatures, the very one McCullum shot, kneels in the mud at the edge of the circle. It crouches, its head cocked as it studies them, its face less than a foot away. Its eye sockets are clogged with mud, but with half its skull sloughed away, he can see the glint of the stones set where its eyes once had been, hard and glittering black.

“...Knew there was a reason...” McCullum starts and breaks off coughing. There’s blood on his lips. He bares his reddened teeth in a grimace, “...why you spared my life back then…”

Somewhere, a scrap of his humanity clings on, watching in horror as Jonathan hauls McCullum up and kisses the blood from his mouth. He slides his hand over the bite as McCullum shudders against him, suspended between pleasure and pain. Jonathan smears the blood against the stone and a shiver runs through the watching creatures. The blood disappears, not washed away by the rain, but soaking beneath the surface.

Jonathan stares but then forgets. McCullum’s cock presses hard against his thigh, and he’s lost in the sensation. There’s still part of him, a distant and almost silent part, that recognises this as a kind of sickness that’s infected the two of them and swept them away, even as he turns McCullum around and slams him face-first against the stone.

McCullum twists his arm back around. His bloody fingers slide slick and hot against Jonathan’s cheek. It’s a strange gesture, almost tender, and Jonathan goes still. The candle, that tiny weak light of his humanity, has reignited. He stays frozen for a long moment, then he drops his head and presses his forehead against the sticky curve of McCullum’s neck. Whispers, “I cannot do it.”

“Too late for that, Reid.”

The creatures close in, bare feet splashing through mud, nails skritching against stone. Shivers of excitement ripple through them in peristaltic waves. They seem not one creature, but many, and they already form a ring twenty deep. Even more of them are crowding in, jostling against each other.

He smells them, earth and sap and seed, and it floods him with an urgency of a very different kind. By the way McCullum’s bucking back against him, with a muttered string of, “_Ohfuckohfuck_,” under his breath, Jonathan guesses he can feel it too.

He glimpses another time, another place, impossibly different, impossibly alien, and he can tell that what he’s seeing isn’t exactly what _was_: reality has been warped to enable his fragile not-exactly-mortal mind to hold it. He sees the court of a king, decadent and decaying, the walls torn down and the cityscape beyond in flames. On the floor before the throne, figures writhe in a tableau of orgiastic slaughter, while the _ thing _ upon the throne wriggles in glee and claps its hands to see its puppets dance. It is a thing of unimaginable horror. He tries to picture its form in his mind and his thoughts reel away in revulsion, but part of it has lodged inside him. He can feel it, squatting in his head like a toad, pulling his strings, making him dance, conducting him with twitches of its long bony fingers.

He’s hard, oh god, he’s as hard as iron, and McCullum’s pressing back against him, gasping, begging him without words, and oh christ he can’t fight it, can’t fight his nature, and after all, aren’t they monsters the pair of them, Jonathan the shadow with red teeth and McCullum who’s stared once too often into the abyss. The rain pours down over the pair of them, as they grind frantically against each other, and it seems like a baptism to a great and terrible god.

He wrenches at the fastenings of their trousers, frees himself, bares McCullum’s backside, and then stops, panting while he fights to regain some semblance of control. Then McCullum presses back against him, growling, “Do it, leech,” and there’s no fighting it any more. He grips McCullum’s hips and maneuvers him so that his throat is pressed against the stone and the head of Jonathan’s cock nudges against his entrance. A moment of easing and a concerted thrust and he’s inside.

They’re both slick with blood and rainwater, but there’s nothing gentle about this. It’s a frenzied coupling, all blood and seed and the thrust of his hips and McCullum bucks back against him, fighting him still. He reaches around to find McCullum’s erection, caught in the waistband of his trousers. Jonathan clenches his grip around the shaft, and rubs, matching the strokes with his own frantic pace. 

Somewhere in the court inside Jonathan’s skull, the mad tattered king claps and shrieks for _ more. _

McCullum comes first, and he comes hard, his seed spilling sticky over Jonathan’s hand, and it’s this that sends Jonathan spiralling perilously close to the edge of the precipice. He wraps his arm around McCullum’s chest and pulls him back, and at his moment of spending he buries his teeth in McCullum’s neck and rips out his throat.

The part of him that’s still awake and watching despairs. Jonathan shoves McCullum forward so that his blood runs out against the stone. Then he stumbles away, pushing his hands into his hair.

In the flashes of lightning, he sees them silhouetted. One moment they’re drawing back, and the next they’re gone, vanishing as completely as if they were never there and there’s nothing but the mud and the driving rain. 

It’s over.

Jonathan collapses on the ground, and wipes the rainwater away from his eyes. Not just rainwater, he realises numbly, but tears too: grief for the man he’s just murdered, a man he considers his equal, a man who, despite the animosity between them, Jonathan rather likes. Then he hears a gasping breath.

It’s McCullum, still alive, just barely. He’s gripping his neck, bubbles of blood popping on his lips. And he’s grinning.

Jonathan rises up, and drops to his knees before him. “McCullum. My God, I’m so sorry.”

“Like I said, Reid. One way or another, it was always going to end like this...” He gives a shaky bark of laughter. “Mind you, it wasn’t exactly how I imagined I’d go.” And then his laughter turns into a grimace of pain. His face is waxy white beneath the streaks of crimson blood, shining with rainwater and sweat.

Something tightens in Jonathan’s heart. “This doesn’t have to be the end,” he says, and the moment he speaks he knows it won't be.

McCullum’s eyes widen in a flash of fear, then he’s shaking his head and shrinking away, showing more fear than Jonathan’s ever seen on his face. It’s the purest kind of terror, as though this is something more terrible than death, this gift that Jonathan means to give him, which is, in truth, no gift at all.

But it doesn’t matter. Jonathan’s too tired to listen to McCullum’s begging, and there’s no way in hell he’s going to let their association end like this with so many questions left unanswered.

“_ No _ ,” McCullum says as Jonathan bites his own wrist, and, “_Nonono, you bastard, no_,” as Jonathan brings the bite to McCullum’s mouth. McCullum fights him, clawing at his face, but he’s weak from loss of blood, and he cannot stop Jonathan from pressing the bloody wrist to his mouth.

It hurts. Teeth grind against tendons and bone – McCullum isn’t as reverent and worshipful as Edgar was – but it’s a good kind of ache. It bites deep.

Finally McCullum sags, going still, all the fight leaving him in a rush. Jonathan keeps the wound pressed to his mouth for another minute, making sure, then he drops his arm and sinks back against the stone. McCullum is barely conscious, caught on the border between life and not-life, but his lips move. Jonathan leans closer, catches the words, “You bastard,” on an exhalation. He closes his eyes and wraps his arm around McCullum’s back, pulls him close.

“You said it yourself, McCullum,” he says, not knowing if the man can hear him. A ragged breath shivers in and out. “Destiny. Perhaps I was never meant to kill you.”

Another shuddering breath. “I’d tell you to go to hell,” McCullum says, “but you’re already there.”

Jonathan doesn’t bother to answer. It is the truth after all.

McCullum stirs, lifting his head, fixing Jonathan with bleak, bleary eyes. “It won’t work. No one knows how to kill leeches better than me.”

Jonathan tightens his grip, presses his face into the curve of McCullum’s neck. The skin there is still warm. It won’t stay that way for long. 

They have to get moving. The sky is getting lighter as dawn approaches and the storm seems to have passed over. There’s no guarantee of an overcast day. They need to find shelter, somewhere for McCullum to finish the painful process of turning but right now he can’t bring himself to move.

McCullum speaks again. “Do you hear me, Reid? I’m going to kill you for this. And then I’ll kill myself.” But his voice is weakening. He doesn’t sound quite so certain, suddenly.

Not that it matters. There isn’t a cell in Jonathan’s body that regrets what he’s done, not now, although in the days to come he suspects that might change. But that’s a regret for the future. Right now there’s only the lingering warmth of McCullum’s skin like the last embers of a dying fire, and the relief to be found in the knowledge that while McCullum might well do exactly what he threatens, at least he’ll be alive to do it.


End file.
